It's a huge load, but now that his opponents in the Republican primary are attacking his career (and his claim that he created 100,000 jobs) we should take a look at one of the more controversial deals he made — purchasing Dade International, a medical technologies firm.

Romney fans say that, even though some people lost their jobs, he made a company on death's door profitable again. His detectors say he bled it dry.

In 1994 Bain purchased Baxter International and renamed it Dade International.

Courtesy of Glassdoor

Bain partnered with Goldman Sachs for the deal. The company was purchased for $442 million, but since it was leveraged, Bain put in less than $30 million. They also charged the Dade a little under $100 million in management fees.

While running Dade, Romney was a very hands on manager, even making copies for himself.

He did not act like a big shot — he bypassed his secretary to make photocopies himself and left the building to buy himself lunch. But his values prevailed: he insisted on cheap, spartan office decorations (the original desks contained no wood) and introduced fines for executives who arrived late to meetings (when he once had to pay a $20 penalty, he looked physically pained, a co-worker recalled).

Colleagues remember him as a heavily perspiring, deeply anxious presence for much of the first year, constantly worried that he might tarnish the good name of Bain & Company by fumbling at Bain Capital.

Bain wanted to sell Dade in 1999, but they couldn't find an offer they liked.

KKR major shareholdersBloomberg

KKR offered $1.9 billion.

So Dade took out loans so that it could buy out half of its share holders. Bain got $242 million and Goldman Sachs $121 million. Top Dade executives were paid $55 million. The total payout to shareholders was $420 million.

Dade's workers were incredibly unhappy.

William T. Mowrey, a field engineer, after Dade bought the DuPont unit, his generous pension plan was replaced by a 401(k); his salary was cut by $2,000 a year and he was not paid for overtime. “They were just trying to milk as much out of us as they could,” he said.

Soon after Dade bought the DuPont unit, it closed a plant in Puerto Rico; all but a few of its nearly 300 workers were laid off.

Dade persuaded a dozen of the Puerto Rico workers to move to Miami, where Dade had another plant. Not long after the workers arrived, the company said it would close that factory, too and declined to help the workers return to Puerto Rico.

In 2002 Dade filed for bankruptcy, 1700 jobs had been lost in the U.S.

The company had simply incurred too much debt, about $1.5 billion of it.

"When I listen to Mitt Romney these days, he talks about creating jobs. My experience at Dade during those Bain Capital years was that it was strictly an investment, not to create jobs," said Michael Rumbin, a vice president of technology management at Dade during the Bain years whose position was eliminated in 2000.

"No one came from Bain and said, 'How can we hire more people?' " Rumbin said. "It was, 'How do we turn our investment around and make a lot of money?' Which they did."